1. Interrogating the‘Germanic’: A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Matthias Friedrich and James M. Harland

De Gruyter(December2020)

ISBN-13: 978-3110699760

Any reader of scholarship on the ancient and early medieval world will be familiar with the term 'Germanic', which is frequently used as a linguistic category, ethnonym, or descriptive identifier for a range of forms of cultural and literary material. But is the term meaningful, useful, or legitimate? The term, frequently applied to peoples, languages, and material culture found in non-Roman north-western and central Europe in classical antiquity, and to these phenomena in the western Roman Empire’s successor states, is often treated as a legitimate, all-encompassing name for the culture of these regions. Its usage is sometimes intended to suggest a shared social identity or ethnic affinity among those who produce these phenomena. Yet, despite decades of critical commentary that have highlighted substantial problems, its dominance of scholarship appears not to have been challenged. This edited volume, which offers contributions ranging from literary and linguistic studies to archaeology, and which span from the first to the sixteenth centuries AD, examines why the term remains so pervasive despite its problems, offering a range of alternative interpretative perspectives on the late and post-Roman worlds.

2. Rules and Rituals in Medieval Power Games: A German Perspective

Gerd Althoff

Brill(October2019)

ISBN: 9789004408487

Gerd Althoff´s new book collects fifteen of his more recent contributions, most of them previously published in German, which elucidate the functioning of prestate societies. Examples from the Frankish and later German realm (800-1200) are used to clarify how rules and political rituals governed behavior in the power games between kings, churchmen and nobles. Such rules (Spielregeln) and rituals guided public and private behavior despite the fact that they existed only as unwritten customs. The long-overlooked significance of this way of establishing order has sparked a vivid and controversial international discussion in the last decades which continues today.

3.Writing Battles: New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe

Rory Naismith, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Elizabeth Ashman Rowe

Bloomsbury Academic(June2020)

ISBN-13:‎978-1788316743

Battles have long featured prominently in historical consciousness, as moments when the balance of power was seen to have tipped, or when aspects of collective identity were shaped. But how have perspectives on warfare changed? How similar are present day ideologies of warfare to those of the medieval period?

Looking back over a thousand years of British, Irish and Scandinavian battles, this significant collection of essays examines how different times and cultures have reacted to war, considering the changing roles of religion and technology in the experience and memorialisation of conflict. While fighting and killing have been deplored, glorified and everything in between across the ages, Writing Battles reminds us of the visceral impact left on those who come after.

4.Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England: From Henry II to Edward I

Christopher Michael Berard

Boydell Press(February2019)

ISBN-13‏:‎978-1783273744

First full-scale account of the use of the Arthurian legend in the long twelfth century.

The precedent of empire and the promise of return lay at the heart of King Arthur's appeal in the Middle Ages. Both ideas found fullness of expression in the twelfth century: monarchs and magnates sought to recreate an Arthurian golden age that was as wondrous as the biblical and classical worlds, but less remote. Arthurianism, the practice of invoking and emulating the legendary Arthur of post-Roman Britain, was thus an instance of medieval medievalism.

This book provides a comprehensive history of the first 150 years of Arthurianism, from its beginnings under Henry II of England to a highpoint under Edward I. It contends that the Plantagenet kings of England mockingly ascribed a literal understanding of the myth of King Arthur's return to the Brittonic Celts whilst adopting for themselves a figurative and typological interpretation of the myth. A central figure in this work is Arthur of Brittany (1187-1203), who, for more than a generation, was the focus of Arthurian hopes and their disappointment.

CHRISTOPHER MICHAEL BERARD is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Providence College. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies.

5. Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity in the Fourteenth Century

S.J. Drake

Boydell Press (November2022)

ISBN-13‏:‎978-1837650088

The links between Cornwall, a county frequently considered remote and separate in the Middle Ages, and the wider realm of England are newly discussed.

Winner of The Federation of Old Cornwall Societies (FOCS) Holyer an Gof Cup for non-fiction, 2020.

Stretching out into the wild Atlantic, fourteenth-century Cornwall was a land at the very ends of the earth. Within its boundaries many believed that King Arthur was a real-life historical Cornishman and that their natal shire had once been the home of mighty giants. Yet, if the county was both unusual and remarkable, it still held an integral place in the wider realm of England.

Drawing on a wide range of published and archival material, this book seeks to show how Cornwall remained strikingly distinctive while still forming part of the kingdom. It argues that myths,saints, government, and lordship all endowed the name and notion of Cornwall with authority in the minds of its inhabitants, forging these people into a commonalty. At the same time, the earldom-duchy and the Crown together helped to link the county into the politics of England at large. With thousands of Cornishmen and women drawn east of the Tamar by the needs of the Crown, warfare, lordship, commerce, the law, the Church, and maritime interests, connectivity with the wider realm emerges as a potent integrative force.

Supported by a cast of characters ranging from vicious pirates and gentlemen-criminals through to the Black Prince, the volume sets Cornwall in the latest debates about centralisation, devolution, and collective identity, about the nature of Cornishness and Englishness themselves.

S.J. DRAKE is a Research Associate at the Institute of Historical Research. He was born and brought up in Cornwall.

6.The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’Revolt

Justine Firnhaber-Baker

Oxford University Press(July2021)

ISBN-13‏:‎978-0198856412

The Jacquerie of 1358 is one of the most famous and mysterious peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages. Beginning in a small village but eventually overrunning most of northern France, the Jacquerie rebels destroyed noble castles and killed dozens of noblemen before being put down in a bloody wave of suppression. The revolt occurred in the wake of the Black Death and during the Hundred Years War, and it was closely connected to a rebellion in Paris against the French crown. The Jacquerie of 1358 resolves long-standing controversies about whether the revolt was just an irrational explosion of peasant hatred or simply an extension of the Parisian revolt. It shows that these opposing conclusions are based on the illusory assumption that the revolt was a unified movement with a single goal. In fact, the Jacquerie has to be understood as a constellation of many events that evolved over time. It involved thousands of people, who understood what they were doing in different and changing ways. The story of the Jacquerie is about how individuals and communities navigated their specific political, social, and military dilemmas, how they reacted to events as they unfolded, and how they chose to remember (or to forget) in its aftermath. The Jacquerie Revolt of 1358 rewrites the narrative of this tumultuous period and gives special attention to how violence and social relationships were harnessed to mobilize popular rebellion.

7.Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond

Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers

Penn State University Press(December2018)

ISBN-13:‎978-0271081212

This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics―works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others―this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups.

From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide variety of case studies that expose how the current historiographical focus on the three religious communities as allegedly homogeneous groups obscures the diversity within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as well as the growing ranks of skeptics and outright unbelievers.

Featuring contributions from a range of academic disciplines, this paradigm-shifting book sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the conflicts that marked relations among these religious communities in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.

8. A Soldiers’Chronicle of the Hundred Years War: College of Arms Manuscript M9

Anne Curry and Rémy Ambühl

D.S.Brewer(January2022)

ISBN-13‏:‎978-1843846192

This previously unpublished chronicle from the mid-fifteenth century covers the English wars in France from 1415 to 1429. It is highly unusual in that it was written by two soldiers, Peter Basset and Christopher Hanson. William Worcester, secretary to the English commander Sir John Fastolf, also had a hand in it, and it was specifically written for Sir John. The content is unusual, as it includes many lists of individuals serving in the war, and records their presence at battles, naming more than 700 in all. Over half these individuals are French or Scottish, so it would seem that the authors had a particularly detailed knowledge of French military participation. The narrative is important for the English campaigns in Maine in the 1420s in which Fastolf was heavily involved and which otherwise receive little attention in chronicles written on either side of the Channel. The progress of the war is well mapped, with around 230 place names mentioned.

The chronicle was extensively used in the sixteenth century by several heralds and by Edward Hall. As a result, it had an influence on Shakespeare. The death of the earl of Salisbury at Orleans in 'Henry VI Part I' Follows the chronicle closely. The 'Mirror for Magistrates' Salisbury narrative is also derived from the chronicle. Another point of interest is that the chronicle is by a scribe who can be identified, and proves to be the only known fifteenth-century account of the war written in England in French, which adds an important linguistic dimension to its study.

9. The Agincourt Campaign: The Retinues of the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester

Michael P. Warner

The Boydell Press

ISBN-13:‎978-1783276363

King Henry V's brothers, Thomas, duke of Clarence, and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, recruited the two largest retinues of the famous army of 1415, whose service culminated in victory at Agincourt. At the heart of this book are case studies of these two retinues, the personnel of which have never been the subject of close scrutiny before. These retinues were made up of, respectively, 960 and 800 men, most of whose names are known from their complete surviving muster rolls. Using this crucial information, and by employing information from a wide range of sources, from official Chancery and Exchequer records to manorial accounts and personal the lives of many of these men can be reconstructed.

One central theme of this book is concerned with the men themselves, and considers issues such as where they came from in 1415, their previous military, career and personal experiences, and whether they had pre-existing ties with either their ducal commander, sub-retinue captain or comrades. It charts the experience of the retinues from before the campaign (the mustering of the army), during the campaign (the siege of Harfleur and the Battle of Agincourt) and after the campaign (the future careers of some men and the influence the campaign had on the ducal affinities). It also considers wider historiographical issues relating to the "dynamics of recruitment", military professionalism, careerism, the changing socio-economic standing of those undertaking military service in the early fifteenth century, and the size and willingness to engage in martial activity of the English military community.

10. Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429–1829

Gail Orgelfinger

Pennsylvania State University Press(January2019)

ISBN-13: 978-0271082189

In this book, Gail Orgelfinger examines the ways in which English historians and illustrators depicted Joan of Arc over a period of four hundred years, from her capture in 1429 to the early nineteenth century.

The variety of epithets attached to Joan of Arc―from“witch”and“Medean virago”to“missioned Maid”and“shepherd’s child”―attests to England’s complicated relationship with the saint. While portrayals of Joan in English popular culture evolved over the centuries, they do not follow a straightforward trajectory from vituperation to adulation. Focusing primarily on descriptions of Joan’s captivity, trial, and execution, this study shows how the exigencies of politics and the demands of genre shaped English retellings of her military successes, gender transgressions, and execution at the hands of her English enemies. Orgelfinger’s research illuminates how and why English writers and artists used the memory of Joan of Arc to grapple with issues such as England’s relationship with France, emerging protofeminism in the early modern era, and the sense of national guilt over her execution.

A systematic analysis of Joan’s English historiography in its political and social contexts, this volume sheds light on four centuries of English thought on Joan of Arc. It will be welcomed by specialist and general readers alike, especially those interested in women’s studies.

11. Venetian Shipping from the Days of Glory to Decline, 1453–1571

Renard Gluzman

Brill(May2020)

ISBN: 9789004348646

Drawing from a broad range of hitherto unpublished archival material and the reconstructed biographies of hundreds of San Marco ships, this book provides a critical overview of the Republic's shipping activities contemporary with the major geographical discoveries of the period, the ascendency of the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, and the on-going struggle among the major European powers for political and economic hegemony. Within this complex framework, the agency of environmental factors receives equal importance beside geopolitics and economic interests, challenging the accepted hierarchy of the factors impacting the maritime history of Venice.

12. Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England

Jill P. Ingram

University of Notre Dame Press(March2021)

ISBN-13‏:‎978-0268109080

In Festive Enterprise, Jill P. Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. Resisting the conventional divide between medieval and Renaissance, Festive Enterprise takes a trans-Reformation view of dramaturgical strategies, which reflected the need to generate both income and audience assent. By analyzing a wide range of genres (such as civic ceremonial, mummings, interludes, scripted plays, and university drama) and a diverse range of venues (including great halls, city streets, the Inns of Court, and public playhouses), Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers’techniques to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Ingram shows that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Rather, marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike.

Festive Enterprise is an original study that traces how economic forces drove creativity in drama from medieval civic processions and guild cycle plays to the early Renaissance. It will appeal to scholars of medieval and early modern drama, theater historians, religious historians, scholars of Renaissance drama, and students in English literature, drama, and theater.

13. Alcohol in the Early Modern World: A Cultural History

B. Ann Tlusty

Bloomsbury Academic(June2021)

ISBN-13 :‎978-1472569783

This book examines how the profound religious, political, and intellectual shifts that characterize the early modern period in Europe are inextricably linked to cultural uses of alcohol in Europe and the Atlantic world. Combining recent work on the history of drink with innovative new research, the eight contributing scholars explore themes such as identity, consumerism, gender, politics, colonialism, religion, state-building, and more through the revealing lens of the pervasive drinking cultures of early modern peoples. Alcohol had a place at nearly every European table and a role in much of early modern experience, from building personal bonds via social and ritual drinking to fueling economies at both micro and macro levels. At the same time, drinking was also at the root of a host of personal tragedies, including domestic violence in the home and human trafficking across the Atlantic. Alcohol in the Early Modern World provides a fascinating re-examination of pre-modern beliefs about and experiences with intoxicating beverages.

14. Publishing for the Popes: The Roman Curia and the Use of Printing (1527–1555)

Paolo Sachet

Brill(May2020)

ISBN-13:‎978-9004348646

This is a study of the efforts of Cardinal Marcello Cervini (1501–55) and his collaborators to publish Catholic religious scholarship intended to rebut Protestantism. It has been argued that the Catholic Church had a restrictive attitude toward the printing press and that it relied on preventing the publication and distribution of Protestant works. Sachet demonstrates that some members of the papal Curia viewed the press as a medium that could serve the Catholic cause. Although Cervini is mostly remembered as Pope Marcellus II, who was a twenty-two-day pope, he was also the driving force in an effort that brought into print a great deal of Catholic religious scholarship.

15. Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain

Alexander Samson

Manchester University Press(October2021)

ISBN-13:‎978-1526160249

Mary I, eldest daughter of Henry VIII, was Queen of England from 1553 until her death in 1558. For much of this time she ruled alongside her husband, King Philip II of Spain, forming a co-monarchy that put England at the heart of early modern Europe. In this book, Alexander Samson presents a bold reassessment of Mary and Philip’s reign, rescuing them from the neglect they have suffered at the hands of generations of historians. The co-monarchy of Mary I and Philip II put England at the heart of early modern Europe. This positive reassessment of their joint reign counters a series of parochial, misogynist and anti-Catholic assumptions, correcting the many myths that have grown up around the marriage and explaining the reasons for its persistent marginalisation in the historiography of sixteenth-century England. Using new archival discoveries and original sources, the book argues for Mary as a great Catholic queen, while fleshing out Philip’s important contributions as king of England.

16. Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender and Coexistence

Susan M. Cogan

Amsterdam University Press(June2021)

ISBN-13:‎978-9463726948

Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence explores the lived experience of Catholic women and men in the post-Reformation century. Set against the background of the gendered dynamics of English society, this book demonstrates that English Catholics were potent forces in the shaping of English culture, religious policy, and the emerging nation-state. Drawing on kinship and social relationships rooted in the medieval period, post Reformation English Catholic women and men used kinship, social networks, gendered strategies, political actions, and cultural activities like architecture and gardening to remain connected to patrons and to ensure the survival of their families through a period of deep social and religious change. This book contributes to recent scholarship on religious persecution and coexistence in post-Reformation Europe by demonstrating how English Catholics shaped state policy and enforcement of religious minorities and helped to define the character of early models of citizenship formation.

17. Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory

Alison Games

Oxford University Press(May2020)

ISBN-13:‎978-0197507735

My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sandy Hook: the place names evoke grief and horror, each the site of a massacre. Massacres-the mass slaughter of people-might seem as old as time, but the word itself is not. It worked its way into the English language in the late sixteenth century, and ultimately came to signify a specific type of death, one characterized by cruelty, intimacy, and treachery. How that happened is the story of yet another place, Amboyna, an island in the Indonesian archipelago where English and Dutch merchants fought over the spice trade. There a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese plotters took place in 1623 and led to the beheading of more than a dozen men in a public execution.

Inventing the English Massacre shows how the English East India Company transformed that conspiracy into a massacre through printed works, both books and images, which ensured the story's tenacity over four centuries. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone and a term that needed no further explanation. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre's position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre.

18. John Davenant’s Hypothetical Universalism: A Defense of Catholic and Reformed Orthodoxy

Michael J. Lynch

Oxford University Press(June2021)

ISBN-13:‎978-0197555149

Recently there has been a revival of interest in the views held by Reformed theologians within the parameters of confessional orthodoxy. For example, the doctrine known as 'hypothetical universalism'--the idea that although Christ died in some sense for every person, his death was intended to bring about the salvation only for those who were predestined for salvation. Michael Lynch focuses on the hypothetical universalism of the English theologian and bishop John Davenant (1572-1641), arguing that it has consistently been misinterpreted and misrepresented as a via media between Arminian and Reformed theology.

19. England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles

David Cressy

Oxford University Press

ISBN-13:‎978-0198856603

England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles examines the jurisdictional disputes and cultural complexities in England's relationship with its island fringe from Tudor times to the eighteenth century, and traces island privileges and anomalies to the present. It tells a dramatic story of sieges and battles, pirates and shipwrecks, prisoners and prophets, as kings and commoners negotiated the political, military, religious, and administrative demands of the early modern state. The Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Man, Lundy, Holy Island and others emerge as important offshore outposts that long remained strange, separate, and perversely independent.

20. The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638–1653

Richard J. Blakemore and Elaine Murphy

The Boydell Press(April2018)

ISBN-13:‎978-1783272297

The civil wars in England, Scotland and Ireland in the period 1638-1653 are usually viewed from the perspective of land warfare. This book, on the other hand, presents a comprehensive overview of the wars from a maritime perspective. It considers the structure, organisation and manning of the parliamentarian, royalist, and Irish confederate navies, discussing how these changed over the course of the wars. It also traces the development of the wars at sea, showing that the initial opting for parliament by seamen and officers in 1642 was a crucial development, as was the mutiny and defection of part of the parliamentarian navy in 1648. Moving beyond this it examines the nature of maritime warfare, including coastal sieges, the securing of major ports for parliament, the attempts by royalists to ship arms and other supplies from continental Europe, commerce raiding, and the transportation of armies and their supporters in the invasions of Scotland and Ireland. Overall the book demonstrates that the war at sea was an integral and important part of these dramatic conflicts.

22. Knowledge and the Early Modern City: A History of Entanglements

Bert de Munck and Antonella Romano

Routledge(September2019)

ISBN-13‏:‎978-1138337695

Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations, impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks in which human and non-human elements continually interact and acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices, shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of cities on knowledge production and innovation.

23. Classical Learning in Britain, France and the Dutch Republic, 1690–1750: Beyond the Ancients and the Moderns

Floris Verhaart

Oxford University Press(April2020)

ISBN-13:‎978-0198861690

Floris Verhaart analyses these eighteenth-century debates about the value of classics, arguing that the Enlightenment, though often seen as an age of reason and modernity, in fact continuously sought inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. The volume offers an interesting parallel with the modern day, in which the relationship between 'experts' and the general public has become the topic of debate and many academics, especially in the humanities, face pressure to explain how their work benefits society at large.

24. The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris

Colin Jones

Oxford University Press(November2021)

ISBN-13:‎978-0198715955

The day of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. At 12.00 midnight, Maximilien Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety which had for more than a year directed the Reign of Terror, was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced.

By 12.00 midnight at the close of the day, following a day of uncertainty, surprises, upsets and reverses, his world had been turned upside down. He was an outlaw, on the run, and himself wanted for conspiracy against the Republic. He felt that his whole life and his Revolutionary career were drawing to an end. As indeed they were. He shot himself shortly afterwards. Half-dead, the guillotine finished him off in grisly fashion the next day.

The Fall of Robespierre provides an hour-by-hour analysis of these 24 hours.